On Thursday, the German parliament voted by a large majority to extend its military operations in Somalia. Of the 578 votes cast, 454 delegates voted for the continuation of German involvement in the mission. There were 115 “no” votes and nine abstentions.

The decision provides for a continuation of earlier commitments to the European Union Training Mission in Somalia (EUTM SOM). Up to 20 soldiers are also to be used in the training of the Somali army and as advisers to the Somali defense ministry. The German military has been active in the Somali mission since 2010, in addition to its other deployments in the Horn of Africa, including Mission Nestor and Operation Atalanta.

As early as May of last year, the government adopted its “African policy guidelines,” which noted “Africa’s growing relevance for Germany and Europe.” Among other things, “Africa’s potential” derived from its growing, dynamic economy and “rich natural resources.” The German government therefore wanted to substantially strengthen “engagement with Africa’s politics, security policy and developmental policies,” to act “early, quickly, decisively and substantially” and “coordinate the use of … the entire spectrum of available means.”

That is the purpose of the German military intervention in Somalia. Dagmar Freitag, a member of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) on the parliament’s foreign affairs committee, justified the extension as follows: “Somalia, as a so-called failed state, threatens the stability of the entire region in the Horn of Africa.” She added, this “remains a central problem in this region.”

The second spokesperson for the government coalition, CDU foreign policy strategist Roderich Kiesewetter, indicated that the mission in Somalia was only the prelude to a much larger intervention in Africa and worldwide. He cynically declared: “We Europeans are not there because we want direct military intervention, but because we want to help people to help themselves. … Above all, however, the roots of terrorism must be fought. It comes not only from Somalia, but also Boko Haram, Kenya and other countries like Nigeria and Libya. It also threatens, as we have just seen in Yemen, the security of Africa, the Arabic world and Europe.” …

Alexander Neu, who sits on the defense committee for the Left Party, criticized the “security policy concept of the West regarding the war on terrorism.” It would “only fight the symptoms,” he said. Above all, he complained of the close foreign policy collaboration with the US. “German state policy” would “rather participate in US war crimes—under cover, of course—than respect international law and human rights when it comes to German-American relations and German-American interests.” That is “the opposite of a responsible foreign and security policy.” …

Only a few weeks before the meeting with the Left Party, President Gauck visited Tanzania and Zanzibar. In Dar es Salam, the capital of the former German East Africa colony, he spoke of “peace and freedom,” “democracy and the rule of law,” and “human dignity and brotherhood.” At the same time, he praised Tanzania as “part of a common market of 145 million people” and applauded the economic and military collaboration of both countries.

Gauck was accompanied by a high-ranking trade delegation led by Christoph Kannengießer, the chair of the German-African Business Association. Just a few months prior, Kannengießer, reacting to the United States-Africa Leaders Summit held last August, demanded that German imperialism be more aggressive in pursuing its interests in Africa—including toward the US.

“For us, this means the Americans would be more relevant us as competitors,” he explained in an interview on Deutschlandfunk. He predicted: “Overall, the competition in these unsaturated markets on the African continent will be stronger and harder. In this respect, I believe that is an impetus for us as Germans and as Europeans to face our challenges and do what is necessary to safeguard our economic interests on the African continent.”

Seven months after war was declared over, journalist Sean Langan arrived in Iraq. He spent three months living in the notorious Sunni triangle, deftly moving between resistance fighters and the American troops. Travelling where few journalists dare to go and filming alone, the producer has captured a rare grassroots view of the war still raging across Iraq.

In this documentary we question Iraqis and Westerners about their perspectives and how they see the future for Iraq and the Middle East. We also ask them what kind of support Westerners could offer to the people of Iraq and the Middle-East.

In our next newsletter you will read more about the project.

…

The music score for the film is composed by Iraqi musician Osama Abdulrasol. During his concert on April 21 in Brussels, the music score will be played before a live audience. You can attend this event yourself and meet with the director of the documentary, Luc Pien, who will present the first fragments of the documentary.

20:00 Welcome by Lieven De Cauter, president of the BRussells Tribunal

20:10 Concert part 1

20:45 The documentary by Luc Pien

21:00 Concert part 2

21:30 Drink + meeting with the musicians and the filmdirector

We highly recommend this concert, especially when you live in Belgium. The cast of musicians Osama Abdulrasol brings with him is outstanding. Here you can buy tickets for this event.

JAMES O’NIONS reports from Tunis, where climate change is high on the agenda

THE sheer number of sessions at the World Social Forum (WSF) can seem quite overwhelming. The programme is divided into six different streams of discussion: citizenship, environmental justice, social justice, equality and rights, the economy and alternatives and migration.

Add in the the difficulty of actually finding the session you want to take part in and communication issues across different languages (despite the valiant efforts of many volunteer interpreters) and it can take quite a while to get the hang of being here. But take a step back from the practical issues and the scale and diversity is really inspiring.

The hundreds of sessions are each being run by multiple organisations from different countries, ranging from trade unions and peasant organisations with millions of members between them to campaigning groups with few or even no staff.

For an organisation like Global Justice Now, there several reasons for being here. First of all, there is no other space in which we can meet and build relationships with such a wide range of people who can help make our campaigns more effective. For instance, as part of our new campaign against the British government pushing electricity privatisation in Nigeria, we have started working with a Nigerian organisation called Social Action. Until now that was happening just over email, but I met its co-ordinator yesterday to talk about future plans.

We’re also here to show our solidarity with other struggles, whether we’re working on them directly or not. The sense of common cause, and of many people defending ideals you also hold in many countries around the world, is certainly motivating for me just as it is for others I’ve spoken to here.

And of course, we’re also taking part in some actual planning and organising. For instance, this year’s WSF takes place eight months before the meeting in Paris of the UN conference on climate change, which is being talked up by some as the next big opportunity for the world to agree an effective treaty on climate change.

In France a broad coalition has come together to mobilise enormous and diverse protests in Paris during the two weeks of the UN conference. It includes environmental campaign groups, trade unions and social movements.

Despite their differences, there is a relatively high level of agreement that the mobilisation can’t simply be aimed at encouraging world leaders to make the right decision given the likelihood that they won’t. Instead they aim to communicate to the world at large that things cannot continue this way and highlight alternatives to the current fossil fuel economy which are already being built.

The WSF has been an opportunity to internationalise the mobilisation. We took part in workshops on how to organise this demand for climate justice, which will be taken back to the French coalition. For Global Justice Now, which will be taking activists to Paris in December to take part, it was really useful to feed into the current plans, which include a counter-conference, a movement space in central Paris with daily assemblies and a mass demonstration at the end of the two weeks.

Climate change is not simply an environmental issue but a question of justice for millions of people all over the world who stand to lose their livelihoods or even their lives for the sake of a rich minority invested in the status quo.

Action on climate change is not just a question of political will but of power, which can only be overcome through mass mobilisation to force a shift to more collectivist ways of running the world. The message we’re taking away from the organising meeting here in Tunis is that the Paris mobilisation is an important step in building this opposition, and I hope campaign groups and trade unions in Britain will get involved.

James O’Nions works for UK campaigning organisation Global Justice Now.

I was born on a Dublin street where the Royal drums do beat
And the loving English feet they trampled all over us,
And each and every night when me father’d come home tight
He’d invite the neighbours outside with this chorus:

Oh, come out you black and tans,
Come out and fight me like a man
Show your wives how you won medals down in Flanders
Tell them how the IRA made you run like hell away,
From the green and lovely lanes in Killashandra.

Come let me hear you tell
How you slammed the great Parnell,
When you fought them well and truly persecuted,
Where are the smears and jeers
That you bravely let us hear
When our heroes of sixteen were executed.

Come tell us how you slew
Those brave Arabs two by two
Like the Zulus they had spears and bows and arrows,
How you bravely slew each one
With your sixteen pounder gun
And you frightened them poor natives to their marrow.

The day is coming fast
And the time is here at last,
When each yeoman will be cast aside before us,
And if there be a need
Sure my kids wil sing, “Godspeed!”
With a verse or two of Stephen Beehan‘s chorus.

OH, come out you black and tans/ Come out and fight us like a man/ Show your wives how you won medals down in Flanders/ Tell them how the IRA made you run like hell away/ From the green and lovely lanes in Killeshandra.

I first learnt Dominic Behan’s fine song from the man himself in the pubs of what many locals in the mid-1960s called County Kilburn.

Kilburn in north-west London had a huge and proud Irish community and the traditional music nights were said to be as good as anything you might hear in Dublin, Belfast or Derry.

The song was always a favourite with me and my wife Ann. We both have some Irish blood in our respective families. Much later we would discover that the subject matter had direct relevance to Ann’s own family history.

We would also, later in life, on some of our many visits to Northern Ireland, explore those lovely lanes in Killeshandra. The town was once an important centre of the linen industry. Today its setting in beautiful lake country has made it is a popular centre for fishing, walking, wildlife and eco-tourism.

Dominic Behan’s song, written as a tribute to his father Stephen — and ironically set to the Orange march Rosc Catha na Mumhan, or Battlecry of Munster — brings alive the hatred of the brutal British troops who arrived in Ireland 95 years ago this week.

After the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916 the execution of Irish leaders including Patrick Pearse and the dying James Connolly led to huge public outrage. This soon turned to support for the revolutionary Sinn Fein movement.

In the 1918 general election Sinn Fein won 73 out of 105 seats. In January 1919 the First Dail — the Irish parliament — declared an independent Irish Republic.

In the same month, the republican Irish Volunteers, fast becoming known as the Irish republican Army, began the guerilla campaign that would become the Irish War of Independence. The main thrust was to attack the hated Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) posts, police stations and barracks.

By 1919 the British administration, horrified by the low morale in the RIC, closed down and outlawed the Dail.

Westminster clearly needed new initiatives and the British government knew just what to do. In January 1920, the government started advertising in British cities for men willing to “face a rough and dangerous task in Ireland”.

Post-WWI unemployment and austerity meant there was no shortage of recruits, many of them veterans home from the trenches of Flanders.

By November 1921 about 9,500 ex-soldiers had joined. This sudden influx of men presented a real problem. There were not enough proper RIC uniforms to go round. Instead the new recruits were issued with war surplus khaki army trousers and dark green RIC or old blue British police tunics.

This sartorial odd mixture gave rise to their nickname, the Black and Tans. The name came from a famous pack of foxhounds from Limerick who wore similar colours. The title would stick even after the men eventually received proper green RIC uniforms.

The new recruits were given only three months’ hurried basic training, and were rapidly posted to RIC barracks, mostly in Dublin, Munster and Connacht.

The first Black and Tans arrived on March 25 1920 and immediately generated hatred and further resistance.

The government also raised a further unit, the Auxiliary Division of the constabulary. This group was made up of ex-army officers. The Black and Tans acted with the Auxiliaries and both were ordered to break the IRA by any means possible.

One of Ann’s relatives was murdered by members of the Auxiliary around this time. One of republican leader Michael Collins’s group, he was arrested and taken to Dublin Castle for questioning.

Just before nine o’clock in the evening he and a friend were released only to be immediately re-arrested for being on the street after the nine o’clock curfew. It was an old Auxiliary trick.

Dumped in the back of one of the Black and Tans’s notorious Crossley Tenders, they were driven to Phoenix Park and each had a bucket put on their head before they were shot at point-blank range.

The Auxiliary executioners were court-martialed but instead of any punishment their commanding officer offered his congratulations.

Black and Tans were paid 10 shillings a day, a substantial wage in those days — and they also got full board and lodging in special barracks.

With minimal police training, their main role was to strengthen the guarding of RIC posts. They worked as sentries, guards, escorts for government agents and as reinforcement to the regular police.

It took no time for them to gain a reputation for awesome brutality.

Black and Tans had little discipline. Deaths of Black and Tans at the hands of the IRA were often repaid with arbitrary reprisals against the civilian population.

In the summer of 1920, the Black and Tans burned and sacked many small towns and villages throughout Ireland.

Black and Tans and Auxiliaries opened fire with armoured-car-mounted machine guns on the crowd.

The Black and Tans justified the attack as revenge for Michael Collins’s assassination of an undercover RIC murder squad earlier that day.

In November 1920, they besieged Tralee, also in revenge for the IRA abduction and killing of two local RIC men. They shut the businesses in the town and let no food in for a week.

On the night of December 11 1920, they sacked and burned Cork city.

In January 1921, a commission set up by the Labour Party produced a report on the situation in Ireland. It was highly critical of the government’s security policy.

“Forming the Black and Tans,” it said “had liberated forces which it is not at present able to dominate”.

Since December 1920, the British government had sanctioned official reprisals in Ireland. The Black and Tans burnt property of IRA men and any suspected sympathisers.

Altogether 7,000 of them served in Ireland in 1920-22. More than one-third of them died or left the service before they were disbanded, along with the rest of the RIC, in 1922.

Today, nearly a century after the Black and Tans’ war crimes, these British bully boys are still remembered and still hated in Ireland.

“Tan” is still a term of abuse in Ireland. And in a delicious irony there is a medal, awarded by the Irish government to IRA veterans of the War of Independence. It bears a ribbon with two vertical stripes. The colours? What else but black and tan — just a tiny reminder of the colours of the still-hated enemy.

MPs have been taken by surprise by about twenty people who entered the lobby of the House of Commons this morning and performed an oratorio called Trident is a War Crime. They are calling on MPs not to support “state terrorism” through nuclear weapons.

They say they have turned to singing because so many MPs are failing to listen to the public, as polls consistently show a majority of the public are against renewing the Trident nuclear weapons system. The protest comes shortly ahead of this week’s Prime Minister’s Questions, due in the Commons at noon today.

Government is slashing funding to public services to fund new nuclear weapons in advance of the formal decision to renew Trident next year.

The oratorio was written by the composer Camilla Cancantata, who has endorsed today’s protest.

The singers, who are from various parts of Wales and England, are members of Action AWE. Many of them were involved in last week’s peaceful blockade of the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE), which is based at Aldermaston and Burghfield in Berkshire.

“MPs do not seem to understand the moral and legal consequences of threatening mass destruction with nuclear weapons. They have lost their humanity and moral integrity. We are hoping that by hearing this powerful and moving oratorio, they will be moved in their hearts. We are singing about life and death.”

The composter of the oratorio, Camilla Cancantata, said:

“This piece is not meant to be a passive listening experience. It was not written for a concert hall audience who listen, applaud and then go away and forget. The words and music are meant to engage and challenge the people in our society who have the constitutional power to ensure Britain upholds international law and abandons all nuclear weapons. We are using song rather than spoken word because we want to give the words weight, urgency and emotional resonance.”

A massive 81 per cent of candidates from all parties have pledged to vote against spending £100 billion on Trident in 2016, according to results of a CND survey released yesterday.

Exactly 80 per cent of Labour candidates in target seats support disarmament.

And Ms West said she and dozens more anti-nuclear Labour candidates are ready to take a “more determined stance” over nuclear weapons if they are elected in 42 days’ time.

“I think we’re in a unique position at the moment because there’s a lot more support for getting rid of Trident than people think,” she said.

“We have chronic levels of inequality and people are wanting us to address that.” She added: “Now more than ever people are crying out for a courageous government. So I’m confident we can win the argument on Trident.”

Ms West, former leader of Islington Council, was speaking to the Star at the launch of CND’s Vote Out Trident manifesto in Parliament.

She was among candidates and MPs from five parties who, in a rare display of unity so close to an election, put aside differences to stand together against Trident.

Mr Robertson said a hung Parliament could help anti-nuclear MPs stop the next government forcing through Trident renewal.

“No one political party is likely to have a majority,” he said. “So it’s entirely possible the SNP, Plaid and the Greens will hold the balance of power.

Part of the influence and power we would exercise is to choose to spend £100bn more wisely.”

CND parliamentary group chair Jeremy Corbyn said a “very tight and confused” situation would require “the utmost assertion across parties of people who are opposed to the replacement of nuclear weapons.”

THE THOUGHT of a play dealing with the “dirty war” in Argentina during the 1970s and ’80s might fill anyone familiar with that grim period with trepidation.

The appalling enormity of the crimes instigated by the US beggars belief to this very day. But These Trees Are Made of Blood by Amy Draper, Paul Jenkins and Darren Clark rapidly dispels such misgivings.

In the theatre’s small C-shaped auditorium, the crowded intimacy of a cabaret is recreated as the quartet of musicians in the corner play The Boy from Buenos Aires.

The “hosts” for the night are the 1976 putschists, the supreme commanders of the three branches of the armed forces, whose rationalisation of their odious deeds is subjected by the authors to biting ridicule — the targeting of the nazis in the musical Cabaret comes to mind — yet the hint of menace and foreboding is never far away.

To the authors’ credit, the combination of slapstick and song is an effective device — bar some ancient jokes — in advancing the narrative in which Greg Barnett is suitably slimy as The General while Alexander Luttley as the air force chief emanates egotism and duplicity.

So far, so satirical, but in an unexpected development one of the guests of the show Gloria Benitez (Val Jones) sees her daughter disappear when invited on stage to join the naval chief (Neil Kelso) in his magic tricks.

This tragedy, and her evolution from housewife to protester with the legendary Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, is charted with unassuming mastery by Jones.

After the interval the mood changes and, in a series of rapid vignettes, the historical blanks are filled in.

There’s a fair degree of disconcerting detail, some loose ends and short cuts that may baffle some in what occasionally comes across as over-elaborate. But it remains a riveting production, directed by Amy Draper with panache, with a cast that is as gifted as it is passionate. The songs by Darren Clark effectively catch the nuances of mood and, Greek chorus-style, comment on the action.

That culminates in a powerful theatrical moment at the conclusion when the curtains around the auditorium are drawn back, revealing walls filled top-to-bottom with the faces of the disappeared to a shell-shocked audience.

This video is called Amy Draper: These Trees Are Made Of Blood; rehearsal.

Set in a timeless Buenos Aires cabaret club before, during and after Argentina’s Dirty War, These Trees are Made of Blood tells the story of one Mother’s search for her daughter. Blending original live music and exciting cabaret acts with an urgent narrative, this is a new piece of political theatre which promises to be an unforgettable audience experience.

So come on in. The club’s open all hours and history can always be rewritten after one too many.

This video says about itself:

These Trees are Made of Blood: How to make empanadas

5 March 2015

The team behind These Trees are Made of Blood give you a taste of what’s to come from this new production.